Katie Pickett

Single mom of 4 boys, blogger, affiliate marketer and founder of a million-dollar ecommerce supplement company. Katie writes to help single moms work from home without having to leave their children and find financial freedom. Katie has brought in millions and millions of readers to her blogs over the years (over 10 million and counting), and earned millions in revenue from blogs and businesses. She has created all of this on her own while working to escape to freedom for her children and herself.

I am a single mom of 4 boys, and I’ve created multiple online income streams, built and sold blogs, and still run a thriving ecommerce business all from the comfort of my home without needing childcare. Most of the bulk of what I built was in the late night hours while I was nursing a baby and the toddlers were sleeping next to me. My office was literally my bedroom anytime my little ones were sleeping.

Making my own money, without needing childcare was my escape from a timultuous home life, and it’s given my boys and I so much peace. I basically unlocked the code to make money online without needing to leave my children through the world of blogging and affiliate marketing. Now, I’m sure that sounds so generic, and everyone is telling you to do affiliate marketing and blogging, but you can and you should. There is no reason to not spend some time everynight working to bring in passive income, and I PROMISE you, you can do it.

And no, I don’t use a bunch of fancy landing pages and clickfunnels! Seriously, you can do this so much simpler than many of the other affiliate marketers are telling you. There are some great uses for things like Clickfunnels if you are a more experienced online writer/marketer, but this post is for those that want easy and straight forward.

I am hoping this post will give you all the starting steps you need to get that spark and get going. There are some courses you are going to need to get started, but these are the courses I’ve bought and actually WORK! I am going to share with you the course that changed my life in terms of bringing traffic to your site right away through Pinterest, and how I write for Google in such an EASY way, so your posts will passively bring in readers that want to buy your product!

I don’t want to give you too much at once, so let’s get you going step-by-step. This is the EXACT step-by-step blog article I wish I would’ve had when I was starting!

Step 1: Set Up Your WordPress Blog (the easy way!)

You need to start by going to Siteground for your wordpress hosting. They are the best, and I’ve been through a few! I used to use Godaddy for everything, and I still have them for some of my blogs, BUT I don’t recommend them. For my main ecommerce business, that brings in over 1 million a year in revenue, I use Siteground. They are fast, reliable, super quick customer service, and you can have them set up your WordPress in a matter of minutes.

For years I was using Godaddy, then I hired a web designer to help me with one of my larger websites, and he was like “what are you doing with Godaddy?!!!” He said Siteground was the best and got me all set up. I have never looked back and his advice was spot on. Siteground is absolutely the best of the best, even in terms of cost.

You will need to get a theme and design your blog, which is so cheap and easy now with the help of Fiver.

Step 2: Find Your Fiver Friend

Next, you can hire someone at Fiver for so cheap to get the blog designed and set up. I highly recommend Fiver because you can find some amazing talent for as little as $7 an hour. One of my best hires is from Fiver at $10 an hour, and in her country that is a great wage. As a single mom just starting out, your time, energy and money is very strapped. For $7, in one hour, you can have your blog set up and ready to go. I personally have set up so many blogs on WordPress, it now takes me maybe 20 minutes, so it is entirely possible you could have it done for even less time and money.

It is not a good idea for you to spend hours designing and setting up your blog. Your time is best spent in the future taskes. Save your energy for the tasks that are most important. Once you’ve found a great person to work with on Fiver, you can come back to them over and over again for small tasks and updates on your website! For example, you may need some specific plugins installed or set up, and they can do all of that for you.

If you need some help on how to write and publish blog posts, they can spend some time walking you through how to do that as well, so make sure you find someone you can communicate with and work with consistently in the beginning. THIS WILL HELP KEEP YOU FROM GIVING UP!!!

Step 3: Decide on Your Niche

This was easy for me in the beginning because I was a new mom, pregnant and breastfeeding, so all of my content was focused on my life at the time. Being a fitness and nutrition professional, I wrote and created content all about staying fit during pregnancy, losing weight while breastfeeding, and my favorite workout routines. You need to choose a niche that you are passionate about because it will make writing and selling your affiliate products so much easier. The key is to become an affiliate for products you actually use, love or know a lot about. Then you can really explain why the product is necessary, who it is useful for, and why you are suggesting it from a personal prospective.

There are many affiliate marketers that do write blogs in niches they know nothing about. For example, many will get into the financial niche because many of the affiliate products are big ticket items. I personally do not do muh in terms of investing and financial planning, so I would never become an affiliate for any of those products unless I had a story to tell of trying one. Always have a story to tell surrounding a product. It could be as simple as you Googled and signed up and liked it, or maybe you tried a million different things and this is your favorite.

No matter what niche you choose, there’s money in affiliate marketing. If you can’t think of a niche, do lifestyle content and write about topics you love. You will see over time what really resonates with people, and you can focus on that.

Step 4: Get on Pinterest

When I first started blogging and affiliate marketing, I wasted seriously like 6 months before I found this course and got on Pinterest. When I tell you that this course changed my life I am dead serious. I saw what Carly was doing, and I wanted to be just like her. I followed everything she said to do, and over 7 years later I am running a million-dollar ecommerce brand. THIS IS A MUST! She walks you through everything you need to know better than I ever could, and it is the best investment you will make.

Without Pinterest, no one will read your content. Seriously. You can’t just write a blog post, publish and expect anyone to know it exists. If you have a social following on any major platform, you’re way ahead of the game. You can share your post with your followers, BUT Pinterest is special because it is a search engine. Your pins will pop up for people searching for answers in your niche, and that will bring in traffic right away.

I also highly recommend this course to help direct you on how to write for traffic to your blog. Getting traffic with the right content is so important! In this course, Carly goes over exactly what kind of posts to write to get to 30k pageviews a month (which is more important than you think!).

Step 5: Find Your Affiliates

Once you are ste up, you need to figure out what you are selling your readers. Finding the right affiliate programs and products is actually kinda fun! Almost every product you can think of has an opportunity for an affiliate program. For example, I have a newer blog I am slowly working on, and I want to earn commission for recommending the Peleton app, bike and tread. I have the bike and tread, so I love to share my workouts, tips and tricks with Peleton. I also want to make money for recommending them, so I searched for Peleton affiliate programs.

That is an organic example of how I will find some of my affiliate programs. Another way is to sign up for many of the affiliate platforms that have thousands of brands and commission opportunties. I use ShareASale a lot, but I think it is worth it to sign up for a few to make sure you don’t miss any great commission opportunities.

A little trick, I make a document or email draft with all my affiliate links. That way I don’t have to log in and get them on different platforms and places every time I write a blog post. I highly recommend getting your links into one place, so it is super easy to copy and paste into your content.

What about landing pages and clickfunnels?

You can sign up for things like lead pages and clickfunnels, and those usually have higher conversion rates, BUT there is a learning curve, and they are typically great for selling one product.

What about Amazon Affiliates?

Amazon is another great place to make money, but I don’t recommend starting with them right away unless you are ready to invest a lot of time and learning. There is an amazing course you can work through that will teach you more about Amazon and Affiliate marketing in generaly, BUT I think it is too much for beginning. I will have another full post on going deeper once you’ve gotten started, have some blog posts up and found your way through the initial stages.

How much money can you make right away?

If you write some great content, that is natural and helpful, and you promote those articles on Pinterst, you can potentially make money right away! It might start slow, a few dollars a day, but as you unlock the key to traffic and sales, you will only bring in more and more money! I still remember when I made my first $100 dollars in a month and I couldn’t believe it. It was then that I said I want to make $4000 a month. I decided that was my goal because I equated that to a 48k salary while staying home with my children. Once I got there, I set a goal of 10k a month. I’ve never looked back, and now one of my companies brings in over 80k a month in revenue.

If you don’t make money right away, do not give up. I didn’t make any money, or get any traffic when I first started for 6 months. But, I also didn’t have this blog post. I had to figure all of this out, and find Pinterest success all on my own. Now, you have me to get you going in the right way, without giving you too much to do.

The more traffic you can get to your content, the more you can make. It is a simple equation, so once you have all your affiliate links set up, and your content written, all you need to do is figure out your best way to get traffic to your site (PINTEREST!). From there, you can see what works to bring traffic and grow that traffic. The more traffic, the more sales.

The fun part comes after traffic and sales are coming in. Then you can go in and make tweaks, find higher-paying affiliates and figure out how to make more money from the traffic you are getting. It is a lot of work in a way, because it is a lot thinking, but you can do it all at night, nap time and while the kids are watching TV. You don’t have to pay for childcare, or depend on someone else to watch your kids at all!